"My eyes! My eyes! You're forcing them O-Pen!"
Songs originally written by Anthony Burgess for a musical adaptation of his classic novel, "A Clockwork Orange," will be performed next summer in Manchester, UK, for the first time in history.
According to The Guardian, Burgess originally began work on his own stage version of "Clockwork" a decade after Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film was released, and the Royal Shakespeare Company produced it in 1990, to mostly negative reviews. Burgess passed away three years later.
In the 1990 version, Burgess' original songs were replaced with compositions by none other than Bono and The Edge (both of whom have clearly moved on to bigger and more dangerous things.) And apparently, Burgess wasn't a huge fan of the reworking, referring to their new songs as "neo-wallpaper."
According to a summation of the reviews assembled by the New York Times after the show's UK premiere, John Peter of the Sunday Times of London called the 1990 production "an intellectual 'Rocky Horror Show' '' and John Gross of the Sunday Telegraph referred to it as ''a clockwork lemon."
In the years since, plenty of other stage versions of the dystopian novel have been performed around the world, including successful versions from the famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, and the Godlight Theatre Company in New York City. In 2003, the ARK Theatre Company in Los Angeles received multiple LA Weekly Theater Award nominations for their multimedia version.
Burgess' original songs are said to evoke "West Side Story" (droogs will snap, we hope) and will be performed next summer by graduates of the Royal Northern College of Music in celebration the novel's 50th anniversary.